TPP 273: Author Katherine May on Autism, Wintering, and the Electricity of Every Living Thing
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
38 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 13 hours ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What sparked Katherine May’s realization that she was autistic?
There was a woman being interviewed uh about being autistic. And as she spoke, I mean now it's really funny because I I listened back to the interview last year and I thought It seems so neutral to me what she's saying now, but at the time it was like these blows landing on me, this kind of absolute recognition and this sense that Finally, here was me. Here was somebody whose experience was so similar to mine and I'd never heard it before.
Welcome to Tilled Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Rieber. This week I'm grateful to have Catherine May as my guest. Catherine is a New York Times bestselling author whose titles include Wintering, The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, and the just released in the US book The Electricity of Every Living Thing: A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home. Catherine's memoir of uncovering her identity as an autistic Woman set against the backdrop of setting out to walk the 630-mile southwest coast path in the United Kingdom. Catherine is also the editor of The Best Most Awful Job, an anthology of essays about motherhood.
Her journalism and essays have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times and The Observer. I loved the voice Catherine gave to autistic women in her book The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and during this conversation we'll get into how Catherine navigated her journey of first self-diagnosing and then seeking out an official diagnosis and what that meant to her. We also discussed how her relationships with others changed or didn't when she shared her diagnosis, the grief that some parents experience when they realize their child is neurodivergent, as well as the importance of wintering or actively accepting periods of sadness in our lives. Before I get to our conversation, if you want to dive deeper into this episode with Catherine, please check out the video.
the show notes page on Tilt Parenting. There you'll find a bullet pointed list of key takeaways, a transcript of the whole episode, links to all the resources mentioned, and a podcast player with the episode broken down into chapters, so if you want to go back and re-listen to a specific piece of the conversation, you can easily find it. This week's episode can be found at TiltParenting.com slash session two seventy three. three. Thank you so much, and now here is my conversation with Kathryn. Hello Catherine, welcome to the podcast.
Hi, thanks for having me.
I'm so looking forward to this conversation. Before I hit record, I mentioned that you you are a requested guest and when people start emailing me and say you have to listen to this interview, you have to read this book. I pay attention and I was really happy to learn of your work. I'd actually like to start by talking about the book that I first learned about your work through, which is called Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. And I heard your on-being uh interview with Krista Tippett, which was just a wonderful conversation. So I'd love if you could just tell us a little bit about that book and why. Why you wrote it?
Sure, yeah. So wintering um is a book I guess that that draws on my kind of lived neurodivergent experience really. Um to talk about the times in life when we feel kind of cast out in the cold. Um so those fallow periods in life when we feel like uh, you know, everything everything else is carrying on around us and we've dropped out, you know, whether that's through mental or physical illness or through a bereavement or you know, something like a divorce or a big life change. Um there are these terms that come to all of us but we don't tend to talk about them very much. Uh and so in wintering I wanted to really kind of manifest them for the world and show show everyone that they had this thing in common.
Um and also to talk about some of the gentle ways that you can endure them, I think is the the best way to put that.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What sparked Katherine May’s realization that she was autistic?
0:00–4:54
2
How does Wintering explore the idea of “active sadness” and why did it resonate during the pandemic?
4:54–9:03
3
Why did Katherine decide to pursue a formal autism diagnosis and what challenges did she face?
9:03–13:54
4
What does The Electricity of Every Living Thing reveal about walking the Southwest Coast Path as an autistic woman?
13:54–21:08
5
How did sharing her diagnosis affect Katherine’s relationships, especially with her husband and son?
21:08–27:03
6
Why is unmasking important for autistic adults and how did Katherine learn to do it?
27:03–32:59
7
What tension exists between motherhood duties and the need for solitary wilderness walks?
32:59–37:55
8
Where can listeners connect with Katherine May and follow her upcoming projects?
37:55–38:05
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
TPP 266a: A Conversation with Poet and Advocate LeDerick Horne
TPP 522: A Whole Child Approach to ADHD with Phil Boucher, M.D.
TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids